FAQ

Last Updated: Sep 8th, 2022

Shipping and Tracking

Packages marked “delivered” on the tracking are tricky because it could be a number of different things. Most typically, this means a package was left at an unusual location at your address. Or possibly, left with a neighbor or put into the wrong mailbox. However, increasingly, we are seeing instances of packages being stolen. We ask that customers do the following:

  • Place orders to secure addresses. For instance, if you know that USPS has access to your building but UPS tends to leave packages in front of your apartment building, you need to leave us an order note stating this. Do not place orders to non-secured addresses where dozens/hundreds of people will see your package sitting in front of your building and you aren’t coming home from work until another day or late at night or similar. Please place these orders to a more secure address.
  • Keep a close eye on your tracking number. If you’re not paying attention to your tracking, you might not know where/when to look for the delivery and it’s much easier for a package to go missing because it will be sitting out for longer. We recommend using a deliveries app or signing up for delivery notifications, when you get your tracking number. This also gives you a chance to ask a roommate, family member, neighbor, etc to grab the package and bring it inside if you know that it was delivered and you aren’t at home.
  • If something doesn’t show up, start by contacting the mail carrier — not the company, but the person who actually touched your package last. If you can, leave a note for the carrier if it’s a daily mail delivery and you can often resolve it that way. If it’s a carrier who doesn’t come too often, this method might not work. Often times, calling the company will not result in any sort of progress in the same way that contacting us won’t help track it down. The person who can help the most with tracking down a missing package is the person who delivered it to you.

Whether we fully cover or partially cover theft is a gray area and not something that we have an official policy towards. The reason is that there are many factors involved and making a policy for it would be too complicated. However, here are two examples, at either end of the spectrum:

  • A package shipped to a busy urban address with a lot of street traffic and no indoor access where you email us three weeks after it was delivered asking where it went — that’s not something we would cover, if it’s marked delivered. In that case, you aren’t holding up your end of the bargain to ship to a secure address and monitor the delivery.
  • A shipment to an address with little foot/car traffic, with a driveway that carriers tend to use, where we have successfully shipped orders before and where the person contacts us within a day of the package being marked delivered. In that case, we would cover it if we can’t get a resolution from the carrier (we can often contact the carrier to get GPS coordinates, to confirm delivery scan location) as it’s likely not theft and more likely to be carrier error.

There are quite a few gray area cases in between where we may offer some coverage or similar. However, we ask that you keep in mind the above information and order/monitor intelligently.

We wish that USPS would not put the “expected delivery day” on their tracking page because they miss it a huge % of the time and it just causes confusion for all involved. Missing the expected delivery day is nothing to be concerned about, it’s totally normal and your package is still on the way. See below for more Q/A on shipping issues. Also see our international shipping policy which contains a lot of information on how shipping outside of the USA works.

Yes, all of our shipments are tracked. You will receive an “order completed” email with a tracking link when your order is shipped. For shipments within the USA, we typically ship USPS. However, for shipments 4lbs and up, oftentimes UPS is a better option, so slightly heavier orders may ship out via UPS. All of these carriers offer relatively detailed point to point tracking.

For shipments headed outside of the USA, we offer an economic shipping option through UPS Priority Mail Innovations or an expedited, premium service through DHL Express.

For more information, please refer to our int’l shipping policy.

It varies. We ship USA-bound items every weekday (Monday-Friday) so typically your in-stock items will ship within 48 business hours — occasionally longer if you order on a Monday and we are backed up with orders from the weekend. Note that business hours refers to roughly 9-5pm Mon-Fri ET in the USA. So if you order on a Friday afternoon, that item is expected to ship on either Monday or Tuesday. In addition, if it’s a busy time of the year, order processing can go a bit slower. T-Shirts and other in stock items (knee wraps, knee sleeves, wrist wraps, etc) will ship out faster than posters which are printed on-demand, picked up and shipped out. With posters, it can take a few extra days for your item to ship as we print them as they are ordered. And that’s with regards to how fast the item gets to USPS or UPS.

Once it’s in the hands of USPS/UPS, delivery times can vary widely. For most items (well over 90% of items shipped within the USA), USPS/UPS will have them to you by five business days from the date that we send it. However, the occasional package does get held up and it can take a week or two to reach you. It’s much more common for tubes (ie, posters) to receive slow shipping than for general packages. In very rare cases, three to four weeks has happened with domestic packages (that’s well under 1% of packages). At the point where the package is in the mail, we have no control over expediting it from that point so we’re just checking the tracking system along with you. Since we have delivery tracking domestically, obviously we’ll make sure that you get what you ordered if, for some reason, a package is lost within the USA.

For items outside of the USA, we will put together a chart of expected shipping times on our Int’l Shipping page.

For the most part. Due to fraud and shipment delivery problems in certain countries we have eliminated some countries from our checkout process. If don’t see a payment method at checkout, you are trying to ship to a country that we don’t sell to via the checkout process. However, if you still want to place an order, email us at support@hookgrip.com and we will work with you to get the order placed. From certain countries, we may only take bitcoin as payment due to rampant credit card fraud.

Returns and Exchanges

We don’t accept returns unless there’s something wrong with the product that we shipped. We don’t accept exchanges for things like a new color or alternative item or for non-USA orders — for non-USA orders, the shipping is usually prohibitively expensive to do exchanges. Please be careful about what you order to non-USA destinations so there aren’t sizing issues.

For domestic orders, we’ll exchange out an identical item if it doesn’t fit but we strongly recommend that you check the information about the shirt/item blank that you’re ordering. In the case of exchanges, you pay return shipping to us, we pay for the shipping the new item back to you. If possible, we always state what blank garment the item is being printed on (in the case of apparel) and we try to offer measurements/suggestions where applicable as well. However, we do know that sizing issues do occasionally happen and we’re willing to accommodate as best we can. Any used or washed product cannot be exchanged as we cannot resell it in that condition.

Shipping is a $6 flat rate for anywhere in the USA.

Outside of the USA, for the 44 countries where we ship via UPS Priority Mail Innovations, we have a tier system based on weight. This means the shipping cost will range from $8-20. We have tiers at $8 (up to 200g), $10 (201-400g), $12 (401-600g), $14 (601-800g) and then $20 (unlimited weight).

For the countries where we don’t ship via UPS Priority Mail Innovations, we only use DHL Express and those charges are not tiered. They are pulled directly from our DHL account and the prices range from reasonable to absurd, depending on the country it’s being shipped to. DHL Express can be fairly expensive but the prices are something that we don’t have much control over. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as easy, cheap, fast and reliable shipping to some areas of the world — we wish there was, however.

We also have a coupon code “hookgrip” which will enable free shipping for carts over $100, not including Romaleos, Antas, thumb tape and ATG hoodies. This works both in the USA and outside the USA. However, it only works for the USA and the 45 countries where we ship via UPS Priority Mail Innovations.

Note, Anta shoes in your cart will trigger different shipping prices. We discuss the Anta shipping costs on the Anta product page.

Products

First of all, seriously, we get that question all the time — usually specifying that American sizes run gigantic. Second of all, the shirts are, for the most part, made by Next Level. To us, the shirts fit normally and do not shrink. Note that items marked female cut are a lot smaller than male cut shirts, so you should check on the links in the description for sizing information. The same person might need a small male shirt or a large or XL female tank and actually the tank would fit tighter than the shirt.

No probably not. We get too many different poster requests. For that reason, we added the Custom Poster option. It lets you order a poster of pretty much whomever you’d like (just by mentioning in the “order notes” what you’d like, we’ll confirm with you before shipping out anything that isn’t super obvious which image you’d like) without us needing to add hundreds of posters to the store to accommodate everyone’s preferences. Note that, per the request of the Chinese federation, we don’t print posters of Chinese athletes anymore.

Usually, yes. We tend to keep a few core colors in stock as much as possible. We do some short-run shirts which are usually only available in M, L and XL. New shirts typically come in every month or so and we’ve gotten better about keep more shirts on hand in the common sizes (ie, M & L) so hopefully your desired shirt isn’t out of stock! If you’re curious about something, you can always email store@hookgrip.com for more information. Items which are not going to come back into stock are marked “Discontinued” — the reasons for discontinuation are many but whatever is left on the store is all that we will be selling.

We’re open to putting more hookgrip items in the store if there’s demand for the items and we think that it’s a good item being offered at a fair price. You will likely see more items and more apparel designs filter in over time. We don’t want to rush into anything that we haven’t checked out as a product. But, in general, we are open to ideas and we want to bring good products to market.

That depends. We do offer wholesale for large purchases of bulk amounts of certain products. If you’d like to know more about wholesale, please email wholesale@hookgrip.com for more information.

Other

We believe in just keeping prices low for everyone. We have lots of high-quality shirts on here for $18-20 that would be $25-30 at most other sites. Our snapbacks are $20 when they’re $25-35 elsewhere. Our wrist wraps are $15/pair when similar styles are $20-35 elsewhere. The list goes on, basically everything we sell (outside of vintage shoes, which are a different animal) is at or below market price. So that’s our strategy, low prices all the time, no coupon codes, discounts or similar. Everyone can see our prices at all times without wondering if someone else is getting a better deal and you don’t have to worry buying for full price and then us doing some crazy 25% sale every other month. It’s definitely a different approach than the rest of the industry but we think this is better in the long run than prices that swing crazily all the time.